Category Archives: Fruit

There’s lots of worry today about kids getting fat, eating unhealthy, filling up on high calorie snacks. Sure. But do you know what the real problem is? Every year, the bad foods get sexier, more fun, and cuter. Meanwhile, all the healthy foods are hanging around just as ugly as they were at creation.

Think about it. On the left, we have cheese stuffed rising crust artisan supreme five topping gooey extreme deep dish tastes like take-out pizza with free cinnamon sugary twist bread and butter soft sticks. On the right, we have broccoli. Seriously: broc co li. First off, what’s with that name? It sounds like something’s stuck in the garbage disposal. And, just what the heck is it? And, how’d we ever get the idea kids would sit up and salivate when they hear it’s for dinner?

Food companies know better. They don’t call those yellowish poo shaped things in the foil bag by what they really are. Cattle feed, ground and mashed in monster vats with truckloads of syrup and salt. Laced with won’t-ever-go-bad chemical secret powder. Then squeezed out wet, blown with factory air, hit with dayglow dust, and shoveled into bags by the tons.

If they called them what they are, they’d never leave the shelf. Instead, whole teamloads of high paid experts are hired to pimp them up. They get completely phony names, like ‘itos’ or ‘ingles’. They get put on TV with big production numbers, cool cartoon avatars, and insanely happy snackers. Really, look at the people in those commercials: are they wolfing chips, or antidepressants?

Next to these, vegetables just look like shiploads of immigrants at the Oscars.

Isn’t it time somebody decided to re-brand and market the food we really want kids to eat? Why do we have to keep trying to push something past tightly pinched lips that sounds like number one? Are we permanently stuck calling it peas? I say, time for a makeover. To get the ball rolling, here are five Good Food 2.0 ideas.

1. Mean Green Bully Blast – Today’s kids want edgy, power loaded foods that will make a difference on the school bus or swing set. Have you ever known any cool kid with a bag of broccoli? ‘Broccoli’ is something musty from the old country you find in grandma’s trunk in the back of the closet that’ll get you flattened and banned.

2. Shred Head with Shag – Yeah, it’s still just salad – and isn’t that a really appealing food name to kids. Does any other word in the English language start with ‘sal’ except saliva? Why would anyone want to put that in their mouth? And, even worse, stop calling them lettuce and carrots – seriously, they sound exactly like something you’d accidentally gag up. Le-eh-eht-tuce. Carrrr-rot. Yuck.

3. Dragon Scales with Wizard Stone Clusters – I don’t know who thought up the name ‘granola’. I do know, not one of the top 500 popular kid’s cereals is called ‘granola’. And, anybody who believes I’m going to sit over breakfast and convince my tykes they’ll poop better when they’re fifty if they eat lots and lots of fiber instead of magically delicious marshmallow shapes, has never been to my house.

4. Sunsweeties – Nature has done a bang up good job of taking pure sunshine, turning it into delicious flavored sugar, storing it in fragrant, bright colored, fun shaped packages. Then, we started messing with things, calling them ‘fruits’ and whatnot, and put the kids right off. So now, companies buy them up, boil them down, dilute the goodness and mix it with gluey, inky stuff and sell the same thing as treats. There’s something funny about that. I’m just not sure what.

5. White Leopard NinjaMight – You can tell just how long ago cottage cheese got its name from the fact that (a) nobody has lived in a cottage since Hansel and Gretel and (b) they stopped making cheese inside them long before that. And what kind of cheese comes out of a dank little hut in the forest in the first place? I can tell you my kids won’t touch it, no matter how good for their bones, with protein and all.

Try it yourself, and you’ll see what I mean. Put your own marketing whiz to use, and stop calling healthy foods by names that doom them to the garbage bin. And, do us all a favor, share some of your ideas here, for other dads. Or, just keep shoveling the s and peas.

If the Big Man spent time trying to find a lure able to coax yours truly deep into a stifling hot field for hours of sweaty effort (where sports and loving were not involved), summer peaches would be hook, line and sinker reliable. It’s that bad.

I suspect the family knows this quirk about me. At any rate, shortly after every Fourth of July it seems they all suddenly find themselves without a free weekend. Dental appointments crop up, along with important and unavoidable back to school shopping, tire rotation, and mystery tummy ailments, that make it impossible to drive any farther than the mall or beach.

I first met stone fruit with my own parents many years ago, when we’d pick and load lugs of them, warm from the trees, into the trunk and onto the seats of my father’s hot black Plymouth, and breathe their suffocating fragrance with the windows down all the way home. What followed were days of mason jars and bubbling great pots, juicy wet newspapers covered with pits and peels, my mother’s longest spoon, and perspiring forehead. We had a great green bureau down in the coolest corner of the wood frame garage, that held a year or more’s worth of that summer’s bounty: jams, jellies, and whole fruits, with golden lids neatly dated in black crayon in my dad’s hand.

And, there were my siblings, out on the summer porch, arms and bare chests covered with dripping, sweet flavor, unbelieving that a colorful bite could produce such sugary liquid mouthfuls.

“Good sun this year”, my Dad would say, and carefully remind us, every summer, that the trees and the farmers put real sunshine right in our hands. We were thankful.

“Good sun this year”, I say to my wife one morning, with the kids running out to play. She looks to the calendar on the kitchen wall, with it’s messy code of exes and times. I don’t mention I’ve already got the list of ripening and variety reports from a dozen growers out to a hundred miles in my back pocket.

“Peaches?”, she says, with a glance, like I’ve just proposed to try and win the car back in one last craps game.

“It’s good for the kids, healthy. And real, fresh fruit,” I remind her. She remembers the aisles and bins of wood-like substitutes they’re passing off at the supermarket. Maybe she knows about the hook, line and sinker, too.

And on the road with the kids laughing in the back, under the blue hot dome and out in the blazing white sun, I’m thinking about sticky forearms and that first, unforgettable, juicy mouthful.